Abstract
Following the recent removal of many legal and social barriers, the number of single women choosing to have a child without a (male) partner—‘single mothers by choice’ (SMCs)—has grown rapidly in Australia. Many of these women conceive at fertility clinics, the services of which are now open to them in every state. Though the overt obstacles to becoming an SMC have diminished, drawing on 25 qualitative interviews with Australian SMCs, this chapter highlights the ways in which fertility clinics have failed to adopt a truly ‘inclusive practice’. Single women have become a large and lucrative market for Australia’s fertility industry, but there is little evidence that clinics have evaluated or reformed their practices, considering the unique needs of SMCs. Rather, single women are typically processed through a normative framework, premised on infertility and heterosexual coupledom.
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Kelly, F. (2021). On the Margins: The Experiences of Single Women Who Conceive at Australian Fertility Clinics. In: Åström, B., Bergnehr, D. (eds) Single Parents. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71311-9_9
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